Easter is early this year (Sunday, April 1), so we will soon be starting Holy Week on Palm Sunday, March 25.
At this time, our thoughts and prayers turn to what happened in Jerusalem during Our Lord’s passion, death, and resurrection.
Tag: Easter
Lent: A journey from ashes to Easter
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On Ash Wednesday, Feb. 14 this year, we begin the season of Lent. The word Lent comes from an old English word meaning Spring time which is a season of new growth.
Lent is a season of the Church when we open ourselves to new spiritual growth so that at Easter, we can renew our baptismal promises with renewed committed faith and Christ-like joy and love.
Make straight the path for Lent
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Word on Fire
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In these days, therefore, let us add something beyond ordinary expectations of our service. Let each one, over and above the measure prescribed, offer God something of his own freewill in the joy of the Holy Spirit. ~ Rule of St. Benedict, Sixth century
In roughly three weeks, Ash Wednesday will arrive and with this commemoration, the Church begins the penitential practices of Lent.
Jesus’ resurrection is at the heart of our faith
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On Easter, we celebrate the feast of Jesus’ resurrection. His resurrection is the heart of our faith.
In 1 Corinthians 15:14, St. Paul teaches, “If Christ has not been raised from the dead, then our preaching is in vain and our faith empty.”
Jesus’ kingdom
Like many Jews who suffered from messiah fever, on Holy Thursday, deep down, the apostles may still have had lingering hopes that Christ was a political messiah who would conquer the hated Roman occupiers and establish his earthly kingdom.
Despite three years of on-the-job training, the apostles often failed to fully understand that Christ’s kingdom was a kingdom of justice, love, and peace and not of power and violence.
Silence is needed to unveil all of the truth
Dear Friends,
It seems like just yesterday that I was writing to you about Christmas and about the depth, the richness of our hymn “Silent Night.”
We just observed Palm Sunday, and were listening, at the beginning of Holy Week, to the story of Our Lord’s suffering and death.
Mending the ‘holey socks’ of our souls
“M-o-o-o-m! There’s a hole in my sock!”
It was Sunday morning, 20 minutes before Mass, and our household was a-flutter with our four children scurrying about donning church clothes, brushing teeth, and fixing hair.
My eight-year-old son was in his room, half-dressed, with a sock on one foot and disdainfully holding up the matching holey one. “I can’t wear this holey sock to church!” he cried.
Recognizing the need for Confession in Lent
Every Lent — thanks to an idea I found years ago on a Catholic blog listed below — we set up a crown of thorns in our living room. It’s just a small brown vine wreath covered with toothpicks, but it has a very specific purpose.
Each time one of my children performs a small sacrifice, or does something nice for someone else, he or she gets to pull a thorn from the crown of thorns.
Acts of sacrifice
One by one, the number of thorns dwindles, leaving the vine wreath bare. On Easter morning, the crown of thorns, now void of toothpicks, is covered with beautiful flowers, a symbol of how God took away our hurtful sins and replaced them with beauty of eternal life.
Lessons derived from the Resurrection
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The Resurrection of Jesus from the dead is the be-all and the end-all of the Christian faith. If Jesus didn’t rise from the dead, all bishops, priests, and Christian ministers should go home and get honest jobs, and all the Christian faithful should leave their churches immediately.
As Paul himself put it: “If Jesus is not raised from the dead, our preaching is in vain and we are the most pitiable of men.” It’s no good, of course, trying to explain the Resurrection away or rationalize it as a myth, a symbol, or an inner subjective experience. None of that does justice to the novelty and sheer strangeness of the Biblical message.
Easter is not a question mark
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Excavating my desk recently, I found the program notes from a Tallis Scholars concert my wife and I had attended a few months ago.
The Tallis Scholars are a marvelous a capella ensemble, but most of their music that night was rather too minimalist for my tastes. In any event, the author of the program notes described Arvo Pärt’s I am the true vine and its “qualities of stasis and timelessness,” as reminiscent of what “former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has described as ‘silently waiting on the truth, pure sitting and breathing in the presence of the question mark’.”
Changes in Harvard’s crest
Which put me in mind of an old joke that used to circulate in the editorial offices of First Things. Harvard University’s crest, it seems, used to read Veritas Christo et Ecclesiae [Truth for Christ and the Church].
Christ and the Church were jettisoned over a hundred years ago; the crest now reads, simply, Veritas.
We are an Easter people!
Over Easter weekend, I watched the 2014 movie Exodus: Gods and Kings, which tells the epic story of Moses and his flight from Egypt to the promised land.
This Ridley Scott film seems to be based fairly accurately on Scripture. After seeing the movie, I did need to do some research into the actual biblical passages to find out who was who. My knowledge of the Old Testament is limited, I discovered.
I was not aware that Moses was married (his wife’s name is Zipporah) and he had one or two sons. He actually lived as a shepherd for many years before God appeared to him out of a burning bush and told him to lead the Hebrews out of Egypt.